Distributed and Pervasive Systems Research Projects

The Information and Communications industries in Finland are strong. There is a constant need for world-class research to benefit our industry and academia. The Data Communications Software group has identified four research areas for the future, namely energy aware computing and communications, distributed systems and services, networking business, and security in distributed systems. The group has accumulated competencies in these areas during the last decade through numerous research projects. More detailled research focus statement can be found from Research Focus.

CIVIS focuses on the ICT-enabled social dimension for harnessing the innovation potential of individuals and collectives with respect to energy prosumption. The main work of our group will be on integration of social network and energy network data and its analysis. See more CIVIS.

We are developing a platform for low cost, low energy, intelligent everyday sensing. The main focus domain of the project is intelligent traffic. This is a joint project with University of Oulu and University of Helsinki and several leading Chinese universities. See more ESENS.

Green ICT for eCommunities (Aalto ESCI), 2013-2015

This is a multidisciplinary research project within Aalto School of Science that combines researchers from ICT, renewable energy physics, business, and cultural heritage. The overarching goal of the project is to find innovative techno-socioeconomic solutions to bridge social media and energy efficiency, which could lead to a major energy and environmental impact.

SIGMONA (Celtic-Plus), 2013-2015

Cloud computing has become an important architecture in today's ICT sector. The telecommunications industry considers introducing the cloud approach to mobile networks, as well. Naturally, the cloudification of the mobile network has both drivers and constraints. A driver for this is the network operators' struggle to keep their business profitable. One significant source of expense is the use of dedicated network hardware to provide the required services. In order to avoid this, service providers look for virtualization of network services. Our research goal relate to the distribution of cloud elements in the architecture of a mobile network, i.e., where are the servers located and are they logically separated to many clouds or a single one. Another considerable question that depends on the answer of the previous problem, is the VM migration and its requirements and performance between cells or regions. This has to be carefully studied in order to provide elastic load balancing in the mobile network. See more about SIGMONA.

Internet of Things (IoT SHOK), 2012-2014

In the near future the internet and wireless technologies will connect different sources of information such as sensors, mobile phones and cars in an ever tighter manner. The number of devices which connect to the internet is – seemingly exponentially – increasing. We need new, scalable, compatible and secure solutions for both the management of the ever more broad, complexly-networked Internet of Things, and also for the support of various business models. The express aim of this SRA is both to create framework for study within the given field and also to clearly define the central research objectives. See more TIVIT IoT.

Energy-Optimized Mobile Computing (Academy of Finland), 2011-2014

This project builds on our experiences gathered over the last couple of years in research on energy efficiency in mobile communication, especially in the context of the Future Internet SHOK programme. We have made significant amount of contribution in modeling energy consumption in mobile devices and designing and evaluating specific solutions to save energy. In this new project we plan to provide models for understanding and evaluating the energy consumption of existing protocols and applications in mobile devices and access networks, and based on these models develop new solutions for mobile computing that consume radically less energy than the currently used ones. See more details.

MAMMoTH – Massive Scale Machine-to-Machine Service (TEKES), 2011-2014

MAMMoTH project focuses on very large scale machine-to-machine (M2M) network. The main goals include pushing the scale of the current M2M network to its limit, meaning to the magnitude of tens of millions of nodes or even more.

OpenTel / Cloud Software SHOK, 2010-2013

Cloud Software Program strives for a breakthrough in cloud software. The main goals include improving the profitability of the domestic software industry, international competitiveness, and developing a new ecosystem around cloud software. See more about OpenTel and Cloud Software SHOK.

Future Internet (Tivit SHOK, 2008-2012)

The goal of the Future Internet programme is to bring together the key research resources to develop future Internet networking technologies and to create new global ICT based business ecosystems. The programme is a part of the ICT cluster of the Finnish Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICT SHOK) coodinated by TIVIT Oy. See more in Future Internet SHOK.

Cooperative Heterogeneous Mobile and Mesh Networks, 2010-2012

Cooperation project between Aalto and Tsinghua University. Computational science relies heavily on distributed functions. It is essential that information can be collected, transmitted, and located efficiently. Therefore it is vital to investigate new network and transport functions. The objective is to foster and sustain a research environment that combines the expertise of the participating units and groups, and that generates high-quality basic research supported by experimental results, joint publications, open source software, and shared experimental testbeds. The key research topics are: a cooperative routing framework, routing metrics, back-bone network routing, wireless access network routing.

ISMO – Intelligent Structural Health Monitoring System, 2007-2011

The project develops methods for intelligently monitoring the health of structures, such as bridges, buildings, and cranes, using wireless sensor networks. New techniques are developed for sensor network communication, data collection, and modeling using both data mining and structure models. See more about ISMO.